Chopin, Kate - Barbara Claire Freeman (essay date 1995)

Barbara Claire Freeman (essay date 1995)

SOURCE: Freeman, Barbara Claire. “The Awakening: Waking Up at the End of the Line.” In The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women's Fiction, pp. 13-39. Berkley: University of California Press, 1995.

[In the following essay, Freeman explores the notion of the sublime in The Awakening.]

The sublime does not so properly persuade us, as it ravishes and transports us, and produces in us a certain Admiration, mingled with Astonishment and with Surprize, which is quite another thing than the barely pleasing, or the barely persuading: that it gives a noble Vigour to a Discourse, an invincible Force, which commits a pleasing Rape upon the very Soul of the Reader.

(John Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry)

You can't make a political “program” with it, but you can bear witness to it.—And what if no one hears the...

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